There Was Insane MR At London Fashion Week

Today at London Fashion Week, emerging designer Gerrit Jacob presented his Central Saint Martins MA collection to an audience that included the likes of Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer and supermodel Jourdan Dunn. Lennon Gallagher, son of Gen-X music royalty Liam Gallagher, walked. The clothing was gloriously outlandish, the kind of thing you always want to see at London Fashion Week (which supports young talent more than New York or Milan or Paris): cargo pants with snarling skull prints, a thermal with elbows made of bra cups, a shimmering teddy bear coat I want to crawl inside forever.

But photography doesn't really paint the whole picture. Why? Because Jacob's show included a heady dose of virtual reality.

Ten front-row guests at Jacob's show sported Magic Leap's One headset, taking in additional images surrounding the clothes. The event would technically qualify as "mixed reality:" you could see Jacob's clothes without it (and there were screens showing the MR imagery for the rest of the guests) but those with headsets saw a whole other world laid on top of the regular show.

"Runway shows are a really nice example of what mixed reality could do, but it could be in shops, [or] on the streets," Jacob told the Evening Standard. "All we do as designers is work on creating the context of the world around us, and to make it become a reality is, to me, an opportunity in every aspect of presenting clothes."

Jacob's show was powered by Three Mobile's 5G technology. Three is setting up a 5G lab at CSM, enabling more design students to work with mixed reality. We live in the future!